So I've never had to worry about my broadband connection, it's always been taken care of by someone else on the prooperty.

Now I'm wanting a place of my own, and I'm wondering what I need to do to ensure the new place is setup properly to allow me to connect via broadband? (tis a rental so I don't know it's history.)

Secondly... ugh what is WITH the plans here in NZ!?

I don't use home phones so for me it's a bit silly to be forced to have a fixed home line just so I can have broadband with one provider, but then pay the earth to another provider for a non landline option.

Any recommendations guys? It's "cheaper" if I have an on account plan with Vodafone; but right now I get my phone plan for free. I don't want to have to move to Vodafone and pay that on top of the broadband fee. I do get 50gb per month with this deal, which is about how much I use per month.

Telecom has a deal going on where you pay $75 for the landline and broadband, but only 30gb. I don't have a choice but to have that landline.

Are there better deals out there? Help?

p.s. did try check the Telstra Clear site, but it's currently not loading. It's them, not me :P every other webpage opens fine.

TelstraClear has a service called "Naked+" which provides cheaper broadband with your choice of either no phone or pay-per-minute, but obviously I can't look up the prices with the site not working :) (which also doesn't bode too well!)

You can get DSL plans without a POTS line. Most of them are called "Naked DSL/Broadband". (Telecom doesn't do Naked DSL, since the POTS line/voice is a gold mine for them still) ISP's like Vodafone, XNet, SNAP, Orcon, Slingshot etc all do naked DSL.

Yep that's what I was looking at with Vodafone... except you still get niked on the prices.

If I have an on account plan with Vodafone I can get 50gb for $55 per month. If I DON'T have a plan with them, it's $85 ~_~ Getting a plan with them will over all cost me more anyway because right now I get my phone plan for free.

I've heard bad things about Orcon's service so not going there. Never heard of SNAP or XNet and I've never been a fan of start up ISPs :/

Snap and Xnet are well established and have been around for quite a while. Naked DSL seems like a fairly niche offering from the large ISPs at the moment.

You may want to look at Slingshot, they do unlimited naked DSL for $90 a month. Performance isn't terrible but you get what you pay for with support. Our flat is with Orcon's unlimited service which includes a phone line and unlimited national landline calling for $99 and we're fairly happy with it. (we "need" unlimited as our usage is about 50gb a week and will only go up as I sort out our physical line speed issues)

Asrafrate:I've heard bad things about Orcon's service so not going there. Never heard of SNAP or XNet and I've never been a fan of start up ISPs :/

Snap's been around since 2005 and X-Net since 2000. I moved from Telstraclear Cable to Snap ADSL earlier this year and couldn't be happier, I pay less, no outages that I can rememebr, the speeds are consistently good and the 2 times I needed to speak to their support team I didn't wait longer than 5 minutes (40 minutes was about the average for TCL when I was with them).

I was with Vodafone before moving to snap. Vodafone was always really good and I have little doubt they still are but they didn't offer VDSL hence the move to snap. If you have sky and\or on account mobile with vodafone I think some of their offers are really compelling.

But for me since the move Snap have been outstanding, I really can't recommend them enough, performance is really good, they're uber helpful and their helpdesk in my experience really is ridiculously good.

What do you mean by the following though? I got a bit lost with what you mean here.

It's "cheaper" if I have an on account plan with Vodafone; but right now I get my phone plan for free. I don't want to have to move to Vodafone and pay that on top of the broadband fee.

if you have no credit history, expect telecom to ask you for a $400 bond, it may be different but when i tried to sign up for a phone on a plan they asked me for this, i told them that if i had $400 then i'd just buy the phone outright and said that i'd stay with Vodafone.

hamish225: if you have no credit history, expect telecom to ask you for a $400 bond, it may be different but when i tried to sign up for a phone on a plan they asked me for this, i told them that if i had $400 then i'd just buy the phone outright and said that i'd stay with Vodafone.

I suspect that likely wouldn't be the case for fixed line. When I moved to nz I had zero credit history and signed up to fixed line with no bond or anything like that.